Joseph Paul Franklin

Joseph Paul Franklin (born James Clayton Vaughn Jr.; April 13, 1950 – November 20, 2013) was an American serial killer, white supremacist, and domestic terrorist who engaged in a murder spree spanning the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Franklin was convicted of several murders and received four life sentences, as well as two death sentences.

James Clayton Vaughn Jr. was born in Mobile, Alabama, on April 13, 1950, the elder son of James Clayton Vaughn Sr. and Helen Rau Vaughn, and brother to Carolyn, Marilyn, and Gordon.

Vaughn's father was a World War II veteran and butcher who left the family when Vaughn was aged eight.

His sister Carolyn recalled, "Whenever [Vaughn Sr.] came to visit he'd beat us," and their mother had Vaughn Sr. jailed twice for public drunkenness.

Vaughn's mother was described by a family friend as "a full-blooded German, a real strict, perfectionist lady. I never saw her beat any of [her children], but they told me stories."

Vaughn later stated that he was rarely given enough to eat and suffered severe physical abuse as a child, and that his mother "didn't care about [him and his siblings]".

He claimed that these factors stunted his emotional development, and said he had "always been least ten years or more behind other people in their maturity."

As early as high school, Vaughn developed an interest in evangelical Christianity, then in Nazism, and later held memberships in both the National Socialist White People's Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

He eventually changed his name to "Joseph Paul Franklin" in honor of Paul Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin.

In the 1960s, Franklin was inspired to start a race war after reading Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

"I've never felt that way about any other book that I read," he later reflected.

"It was something weird about that book."

In the early 1970s, he took a road trip to an American Nazi Party conference in Virginia with David Duke (then a student) and Don Black.

For much of his life, Franklin was a drifter, roaming the East Coast seeking chances to "cleanse the world" of people he considered inferior, especially black and Jewish people.

His primary source of financial support appears to have been bank robberies.

Franklin supplemented his income from criminal acts with paid blood bank donations, which eventually led to his subsequent capture by the FBI.

Following the two murders in Utah, Franklin returned to the midwestern U.S. Traveling through Kentucky, he was detained and questioned regarding a firearm that he was transporting in his car.

Franklin fled from this interrogation, but authorities recovered sufficient evidence from his vehicle to potentially link him to the sniper killings.

His conspicuous racist tattoos, coupled with his habit of visiting blood banks, led investigators to issue a nationwide alert to blood banks.

Franklin was on Missouri's death row for 15 years awaiting execution for the 1977 murder of Gerald Gordon.

He also confessed to the attempted murders of magazine publisher and pornographer Larry Flynt in 1978 and civil rights activist Vernon Jordan in 1980.

Both survived their injuries, but Flynt was left permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

Franklin was not convicted in either of those highly publicized cases, and he made his confessions years after the crimes had occurred.

In October 1980, the tattoos drew the attention of a Florida blood bank worker, who contacted the FBI.

Franklin was arrested in Lakeland on October 28, 1980.

Franklin faced legal action across the U.S. for the next two decades, eventually being convicted of multiple murders, attacks, and other crimes at both the state and federal levels.

He was sentenced to life in prison and received the death penalty in several states.

Franklin tried unsuccessfully to escape during the judgment phase of his 1997 Missouri trial on charges of murdering Gerald Gordon but was ultimately convicted.

Psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who had interviewed him at length, testified for the defense that she believed that he was a paranoid schizophrenic and unfit to stand trial.

Lewis noted his delusional thinking and a childhood history of severe abuse.

He was executed by lethal injection on November 20, 2013.

In October 2013, victim Larry Flynt called for clemency for Franklin, asserting "that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself."

Franklin was held on death row at the Potosi Correctional Center near Mineral Point, Missouri.

In August 2013, the Missouri Supreme Court announced that Franklin would be executed on November 20.

Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said in a statement that by setting execution dates, the state high court "has taken an important step to see that justice is finally done for the victims and their families."

Franklin's execution was affected by the European Union export ban when the German drug manufacturer Fresenius Kabi was obliged to refuse having their drugs used for lethal injections.

In response, Missouri announced that it would use for Franklin's execution a new method of lethal injection, which used a single drug provided by an unnamed compounding pharmacy.

A day before his execution, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey (Jefferson City) granted a stay of execution over concerns raised about the new method of execution.

A second stay was granted that evening by US District Judge Carol E. Jackson (St. Louis), based on Franklin's claim that he was too mentally incompetent to be executed.